Technically Iâ€™m Out of the Rat Race

To any Rich Dad student or CashFlow game player, the first goal is to get out of the Rat Race. As defined in the game this goal is based on a simple formula: Passive Income greater than Expenses. To most people it also means not having to work for a living.

When I started my online business in February that was my first goal. The first couple months were in exploration mode; I created this site and a forum and began to learn the ropes online.

Then on June 1, I got together with a partner and we started in earnest to go after earning some money online. Recently I wanted to do a first quarter rap up of our efforts and as I was doing it I crunched together some numbers and realized that, to my surprise, I’m technically out of the Rat Race!

My monthly expenses break down to be only $40US a day [one of the beautiful things about passive income is that you get paid 7 days a week, because you aren't working for it]. As you can see from the chart, we have clipped past the $80 [I have a partner to split it with] mark for the past few days.

Unlike in Rich Dad’s CashFlow game I don’t get to jump instantly 10 years into the future, so I won’t be quitting my day job immediately. My criterion for that is for the business to have enough banked to be able to pay me my current salary for 6 months, even if revenue died completely.

As I see it there have been two keys to getting to this point so quickly. The first was insisting on passive income. When I started to make a couple bucks a day on this site, it was clear that I could ramp up a few blogs and make decent money, but it was also clear that a blog depends heavily on constant input from it’s author, therefore, even though it was tempting I passed on putting substantial energy into the blog concept.

The other key point was to choose a partner carefully. It’s not that I went through a big process but I trusted my intuition and it has been bang on. The ying-yang effect of our working relationship has been phenomenal. The stuff he is best at is my weakness and the stuff I love to do is what he wouldn’t touch. There is no way I’d be at half of where we are today working alone, not even close!

For someone who has been fiercely independent [basically a loner] my whole life, the step of taking on a partner has been completely amazing.

Out next goal is to average $208 dollars a day for a 30 day period. At that point we will have completely matched our current job income. From there we will get serious about accumulating assets and building net worth. The extra 40 hours a week that we will gain at that point will accelerate the process considerably.

I just wanted to share the stats, partly hoping it will inspire and partly as an excuse for not writing as much as I’d like to on this site lately. I do apologize that it’s become Smart Money every second Daily, however I’m definitely getting better at the Smart Money part and I’m looking forward to sharing that information.